Quote:
Originally Posted by Mortis
The OP bailed huh? Probably for the best, seems the thread started off full of... never mind
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I'm not sure that the OP was particularly well expressed, but I think the basic idea has some merit.
As far as I can see copyright is dead. There's a graph floating around the Net now that shows how the music industry sales have plummeted over the past few years. To me, it looks like file sharing is going to reduce that industry, as an industry, down to nothing in about 5 years.
It seems to me that once a sizable proportion of a society starts to ignore a law, then that law no longer reflects the shared values and morality of that society. From what I've seen, copyright has pretty much been rejected by society - certainly at least as far as music is concerned, and I can't see how books are going to be any different.
Looking back, it appears that the only thing that copyright ever stopped was corporate entities poaching other publisher's IP. It never was a factor for individuals because copying has always been expensive and/or resulted in a drop in quality with the copy. As soon as individuals had the ability to cheaply make copies and distribute them without any loss of loss of quality, they started doing it, by the millions. And the copyright laws don't seem to have any influence on their behaviour at all.
So I'll agree with the OP that copyright has always been an illusion. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but I don't see any point in fighting reality. Copyright won't work, because lots and lots of people don't want it.
The real question, as far as I can see, is how we create a system that fosters creators to create new, high quality content in the absence of copyright protection.